Unexpected Calbee Set and 2025 Epoch Ones

Training camps are opening in Japan tomorrow (well, pretty much as I write this in the evening of January 31st on the US East Coast) and there's a couple new items that have popped up in the last day or so so I thought I'd do a quick post on them.

- For the second year in row, Calbee has issued an unexpected set in January.  Last year it was a 36 card team set for the Hawks that was probably delayed for a few months.  This year it's a 47 card set that's a tie-in to the video game "Pro Yakyu Spirits".  The latest version of the game was released back in September so I suspect that Calbee meant to publish this set earlier.  The cards all have a "cover date" of 2024.  47 is an odd number of cards for an NPB set to have but when you take a look at the checklist, you'll see what happened.  The checklist is arranged basically as four groups of 12 with each group having a player from each of the twelve NPB teams in it.  Well, that's how it was SUPPOSED to be but card #PS-11.  Extrapolating from the teams that are included in the other cards in that first group, you can see that the player who's missing is from the Marines.  I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to guess that that was originally supposed to be Roki Sasaki but he had to be pulled from the set since he was heading to MLB.  The first 23 cards were picked by Konami while the last 24 cards were selected from user voting.  As far as I can tell, they are available all over Japan (as opposed to the Hawks cards from last year which were only available in Kyushu).  The cards are already on sale as someone on Reddit had a photo up of some of them.  I also was told by Kenny (Zippy Zappy) that he'd seen them in a convenience store - I assume he was in Tokyo.

- Epoch is back with their on-demand Epoch One cards.  Like last year, the 2025 edition of the cards is starting with draft pick cards.  So far, there are 47 cards available featuring the 2024 draft classes (regular phase, no development players) for the Marines, Dragons, Fighters, Lions, Eagles, Swallows, Baystars and Giants.  It would not surprise me to see Epoch add cards for the Hawks and Tigers draft picks as well since they, along with the other eight teams, were the teams that Epoch included in the Epoch One cards last year.  The Buffaloes and Carp would surprise me since Epoch has never done Epoch One cards for Orix and hasn't done them for the Carp since 2019.  The cards are still 500 yen each, as they have been since 2018.